752 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



affairs. And all this is thoroughly compatible with a strict sense of 

 honor and with conscientious devotion to what he believes to be the best 

 interests of the institution. But the result is unfortunate. The execu- 

 tive duties of his office render the president less and less fitted as the 

 years go by to represent the purely educational side of the institution, 

 yet every year strengthens his control of all the interests. This condi- 

 tion is not in accord with business common sense. 



If the proper status of the faculties is to be restored, and if the 

 proper standard of educational efficiency is to be regained, there must 

 be a radical change in relations of the teaching and corporate boards. 

 In church organizations, the religious interests are ordinarily in care 

 of one board and the secular interests in care of another ; but the former, 

 being charged with the interests for which the church was organized, 

 is superior to the latter, although this represents the corporate body 

 before the law. A similar grouping and relation should exist in educa- 

 tional organizations. The trustees should not control in any degree 

 the internal affairs of the college or university, their duty being to 

 relieve the teaching board from the burden of caring for business mat- 

 ters and to represent the institution before the state. They should fill 

 vacancies in their number, subject to veto by, say, two thirds vote of 

 the full professors; but the faculties should have complete control of 

 all matters relating to the actual work of the institution and they 

 should make all appointments to the teaching staff, subject to merely 

 pro forma confirmation by the trustees, as representing the corporate 

 body, or to veto by them in case there are not funds to warrant the 

 expenditure. The office of college president, as it now exists, should 

 be abolished; each faculty in a university or the single faculty in a 

 college should choose its own executive head, who should be simply 

 primus inter pares and should be the mouthpiece of his faculty in con- 

 ference with other faculties or with the trustees. In a university, the 

 several executives would be a council to determine matters affecting the 

 policy of the institution as a whole. 



Some appear to dread such reconstruction as liable to bar all prog- 

 ress, for it has been said that, somewhere, the most important advances 

 have been made in face of earnest opposition by professors. Possibly. 

 But it may be that some steps, advances in the opinion of a president, 

 might be retrogression in the opinion of an educator. The dread, how- 

 ever, is unnecessary in view of the fact that the remarkable elevation 

 of standard in legal and medical education within the last twenty years 

 is due wholly to the professors themselves and largely, in most cases, 

 at their expense. This statement is equally true of schools of applied 

 science and it is well understood that in colleges the professors con- 

 stantly struggle for maintenance of high standards. More than this. 

 Professors have been known to show themselves capable of attending 



